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Saturday, 31 December 2016

Rabbi
Lionel Blue z”l

What
I remember most vividly was the cauliflower soup. It was the first time I’d
been on a Retreat with my fellow rabbinic students from Leo Baeck College. So
I’m going back 40 years or so. It was a cold, November day, in a rather
austere, ramshackle Christian priory in Sussex that Rabbi Lionel Blue had taken
us to. That first morning we practised sitting in silence – such a hard thing
for Jews to do. Lionel suggested half an hour to start with – to be quiet, see
where our minds went and whether, beyond the chatter in our heads, we could
hear anything else.

This
was hard to do at first – it was such an alien concept, so ‘Christian’ to my
provincial Jewish mind. But we trusted Lionel, or at least I did: he was one of
my teachers, and a different kind of teacher from the more
academically-oriented teachers I was used to at Leo Baeck College. He had
something else to teach, something that came out of his own lived experience,
his own struggles with faith, his own struggles with life.

He
spoke of his God as a friend, as a conversation partner, as a voice that did
not always tell him what he wanted to hear but that was available if he,
Lionel, allowed himself to listen. Lionel’s God seemed to accompany him on his
journey through life, provoking him, re-assuring him, comforting him, nagging
him, reminding him of the things that mattered in life, giving him a
perspective on what really counted, helping him understand how something that seemed
to be important in the heat of the moment could turn out to be trivial in the
larger scheme of things. Lionel’s God helped him discriminate – as Lionel might
say - between God’s point of view which was infinite and ours, which is always
limited.

Because
we were trainee rabbis we were very keen to discuss the idea of God, to swap theological insights - but we weren’t very
good at moving out of our heads towards our hearts. But for me Lionel’s
retreats were a highlight of my time as a student rabbi because they allowed
time to focus on experience and exploration and not just on thinking and
knowing, or pseudo-knowing.

It’s
not that Lionel was not a thinker – on the contrary. Around that time I went to
a conference where Lionel was one of the speakers and his theme was post-War
European Jewish life; and I remember how he spoke for an hour without notes and
gave a brilliant survey of how Jewish life was being lived in Germany and
Holland and France and Italy and the UK. It was a stunning tour de force, a vivid, detailed portrait - and he concluded with
one thing which has stuck in my mind ever since.

That
what the experience of the War had taught Jews - should have taught Jews -
wherever they lived in Europe, was not to put their trust in political parties
or economic theories: that ‘boom and bust’ was always going to be the pattern
of history – and that if Jews trusted in material things, hoping they would
last, hoping that they could gain security from what was in the end transient,
they would always come unstuck, or come to
grief. That to be Jewish meant trusting in what you couldn’t see, couldn’t
count, couldn’t measure, couldn’t hold in your hands – it meant trusting in the
spirit. This was what it meant to live in a tradition with a God you couldn’t
see. Judaism was an education in trusting the intangible.

Lionel
had a first-class mind – you might have forgotten that if you just heard his
often whimsical, folksy contributions to BBC radio’s ‘Thought for Today’. He just recognised
that he couldn’t rely on the mind, the intellect, alone to get him through
life. He was after the inner experience contained within all those clever
theological words that we LBC students were bandying about that chilly autumn
day.

But
back to the cauliflower soup. Lionel had
disappeared at some stage during the afternoon and by supper time - with an
economy of effort and more than a soupçon of
unrehearsed love – he produced a giant tureen of the most heart-warming, rich,
smooth, creamy, flavoursome cauliflower soup that you could imagine. His soup spoke
more eloquently of the spirit than all our high-flown rabbinic waffling. This
was food for - and from - the soul.It
tasted, so to speak, of heaven.

For
Lionel, the preparing and cooking and eating and sharing of food was a primary
medium for spiritual self-expressiveness. He built a lot of his Jewish thinking
around the kitchen. He taught how the cupboards and cabinets and drawers of the
Jewish home contained the artefacts of Jewish spirituality: the candlesticks
and bread covers and wine cups for Shabbat, lying neglected during the week, were
capable of transforming secular time into holy living when the hour was right.

In
his first book – which was arguably his best (To Heaven With Scribes and
Pharisees, 1975) – he’d written how: ‘in
the cupboards [of the Jewish home] holy and secular meet and jostle, there is
no strain, for all things can be transformed if they are turned to God.
Cocktail cabinets and the kitchen drawer are the sacristy for the liturgy of
the home’.

Indeed
for Lionel any gathering of convivial souls, where food was honoured, was a
form of secular transubstantiation: God made present through the bonds of
family, friends, guests, brought together to celebrate the joys of sharing
food, hospitality, intimacy and laughter.

Like
many people who have pockets of pain tucked away, Lionel used laughter a lot in
his teaching. Humour was an essential ingredient in his repertoire – but when
he wanted to he could move from laughter and a lightness of being to
seriousness and thoughtfulness in the twinkling of an eye.

But
he never pontificated. When I heard him talk over the years I almost never
heard him addressing the large themes that rabbis often find themselves
speaking about – politics, the environment, social justice, Israel, communal
Jewish politics, world events. He usually focused on the human, the local, the
small scale, the personal, on individual acts of kindness and generosity he’d
witnessed, on people’s relationship to animals, to their actual neighbours, to
the everyday joys and sadnesses of family life.

He
spoke about conversations with people he’d actually met: for many years when I
lived in Finchley I’d see Lionel in the High Street, stopping or getting
stopped every few yards, talking to someone - they might be well-dressed or a vagrant, it
never seemed to make a difference, he treated them the same - and sometimes
people were talking to him and he was listening, and sometimes he was talking
to them, but he had time for all of them, old and young, rich and poor, he
never seemed hurried. It never seemed to me as I watched him – and I did watch
him – as if he had his own life to live. It was as if he saw theserandom meetings and conversations as his life
– his own life was not separate from this – these were the encounters, the
meetings, that mattered, that fed his own life, that were his life.

The
stuff that happened to him every day was the religious material of his life:
this is what he learnt from; and this is what he taught about. That a random,
overheard remark going down the Finchley High Road could change your life – it
was like an angel speaking in your ear. No, not ‘like’ an angel, it was an
angel. A message and messenger from the Divine. This was a piety both simple
and profound.

Although
he ended up paradoxically as head of the Reform Beth Din, Lionel didn’t have
much time for the Jewish religious establishment – ‘too much role playing’, he’d
say - and he was a religious pragmatist: he thought that the only parts of
religious tradition worth saving were the parts that you found worked for you -
the rituals or prayers that spoke to you, or that you could use in such a way
that God spoke to you through them.

The
rest of it, if it was all jumbo-jumbo to you – well, you should just ditch it
and find something else that worked. That’s what I mean by a pragmatist. Find
what works and use it – and if what works for you is a Quaker meeting or a
Buddhist meditation technique, that’s fine: just use it. Be a magpie, take what
you need. That’s part of what made him a great religious ecumenical figure. He
could see the value in other religious traditions and didn’t feel the need to
claim that his own was better, or more truthful.

So,
to come back to food for a moment, Lionel taught me how -- like the Mass or the
Eucharist ceremony, the Hindu food offering to the gods, the Sikh kara prashad holy sweet, the Muslim shir kurma dessert at the end of
Ramadan, and the Buddhists in Japan celebrating with red beans and rice --
Jewish food was also a route to holiness. And that anyone, sophisticated or unlearned,
could make it part of their journey to holy living.

So
Lionel was a religious pragmatist. But he was also a sentimentalist, after a
fashion. He wasn’t a nostalgist for some lost world of Jewish innocence or
idealised shtetl life – growing up in the harshness and hard-headedness of the
East End of London meant that he was immune to any idealisation about the Jewish past. But he was
a sentimentalist in that he believed – or wanted to believe, I could never
quite work out which – in simple truths
about the innate goodness of the human heart. And about how God was his best
friend. And a sentimentalist in his belief that a good story could take you a
very long way in helping people overcome their fears and problems. And this was
in spite of years and years he spent in therapy coming to terms with his own
demons.

And
he did become a great storyteller, a great myth-maker, often about his own
life. He once admitted to me that he was a mythographer: he wove personal
anecdotes into religious material that he could then retail and re-tell. He’d
found there was always a ready audience for this kind of storytelling. He told
some stories about his formative experiences so many times that they were honed
to perfection, but would still change from book to book, from interview to
interview, tweaked to bring the best out of them for each occasion.

This
isn’t a criticism – I say it in admiration, and awe, and envy, for the gift he
had of being the raconteur of his own life. He was a craftsman weaving a rich
tapestry out of the fabric of his eventful and idiosyncratic life.

His
pragmatism and sentimentalism were often there at the same time. On that first
retreat I remember him saying apropos the soup: ‘Theologies alter and beliefs
may die, but smells always remain in memory’. And there you have it – the essential
religious understanding and the naked appeal to subjective feeling in one
sentence. Maybe it was a quote from one of his books, or maybe it ended up in
one of his books – but it doesn’t matter. He had a gift for turning experience
into memorable language - you can almost always tell in our Reform liturgy the
prayers that Lionel wrote. They have stood, and will stand, the test of time
because they have a humanity to them, a truthfulness of feeling, that speaks to
the heart and not to the head. Words mattered to him – almost as much as food.

He
knew that his legacy would not only be in the memories people would have of him
but the words he’d leave behind. A few years ago I interviewed him for a
celebratory volume for his co-liturgist Rabbi Jonathan Magonet, about their
work together in Europe in the 1960s and 70s, when the trauma of the Shoah was
still heavy on the ground, and it became necessary to build a new European
Jewish consciousness out of the ashes of destruction. Lionel wanted to see the
text of the interview before it was published, to read it and edit it, to shape
it as he wanted the story to be remembered - which of course I let him do, even
though by that time, because of his Parkinson’s, he could hardly hold in his
hand a pen to do the editing. Words
mattered. How you told the story mattered. The truth was in how it was told not just in what was told.

What
would Lionel make, I wonder, of the mess we are in now in Europe, as one annus horribilis ends, and another year
breaks onto the shoreline in front of us? He’d probably have a joke to cheer us
up, or at least a good story. Maybe the story I first heard him tell during
that Retreat, that speaks of where we are and how we need to go about facing
our futures. He called it Heaven and Hell.

It’s
the story about a rabbi who wanted to see both heaven and hell. He fell asleep
and dreamt that he was standing in front of a door, that opened into a room;
and the room was prepared for a feast. A table was set and at its centre lay a
great dish of delicious hot food. Guests sat around the table with long spoons
in their hands, but they were crying out with hunger and wailing in pain: the
spoons were so long that, however they distorted themselves, they could not get
the food into their mouths. Unable to nourish themselves, they cursed God the author of their plight.And the rabbi awoke, knowing he had seen
hell.

But
he fell asleep again and dreamt that he was standing in front of a door, that
opened into a room; and the room was prepared for a feast. A table was set and
at its centre lay a great dish of delicious hot food. Nothing had changed and
he was about to cry out in horror. Then he saw that the guests had smiles on
their faces, for with the same long spoons they were reaching out across the
table to feed each other. And they were giving thanks to God the author of
their joy. The rabbi awoke and he too blessed God who had shown him the nature
of heaven and the nature of hell. And the chasm – just a hairsbreadth wide --
that always divides them.

[based
on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 31st December
2016]